A Different Kind of Grieving: Hurricanes and Deconsecration

It was a good week-end, a 4 day week-end really with Fall Break included.  With Fall Break included, it was a GREAT 4 day week-end, full of activities which nourish me, both literally and figuratively:  cutting and stitching fabric, cooking and eating great food, writing a sermon and preaching at Faith Lutheran in Bristol (TN), reading and watching a wide assortment of recordings.

Every so often, a certain sadness crept in.  We watched the PBS show This Old House, the 2 episodes of the current season where the team comes to the Asheville area to help rebuild after Hurricane Helene.  I felt this odd mixture of grief and gratitude.  It's a bit of survivor's guilt at how much damage we did not sustain during Hurricane Helene.  

There's also some past hurricane trauma mixed with sadness about damage to past houses and my inability to make finances in South Florida work out.  I say "my inability," but it's really not my fault--the inability is structural, both done intentionally (insurance policies and lack of decent jobs that allow people to afford necessities like housing) and some out of our collective control now, like the changes wrought by climate change.  

There's gratitude that we sold the house when we did and got a lot of money out of it, something that will not be possible in years to come (and may, indeed, not be possible now).  It was a weird mix of emotions that left me in tears on Saturday night.

I experienced something similar last night as we watched the Sunday service from our old church in South Florida.  It was not just a worship service but the last service in that building.  Over the past several years, a new worship space has been built, so the news is happy.  There will be a gas station where the old sanctuary sat, so I have mixed feelings about that:  hurrah for the money and new building that the church gets, hesitation about a gas station's negatives.

But as I watched the service, which included prayers and liturgy of deconsecration, I felt sadness sweeping over me.  It's a ridiculous sadness in a way, not the least of which is that I'm no longer there.  Other people have much more of a right to make decisions than I do--and I was part of the church council back in 2019 that unanimously voted to move forward with these plans.  The sanctuary is a dark, dreary worship space--and yet, I feel this nostalgia for it.

I see my emotional state on both Saturday and Sunday night as a form of grieving, and it's not a grieving that gets discussed as much.  I feel like my grieving makes no sense--I'm grieving a loss that got me/us to a better place.  And yet, the losses are real.

I know enough about grief work that I know it's wise to let the tears come, to let myself feel both the grief and the joy.  I don't need to talk myself out of feeling what I feel.  The process will be much easier if I just let the feelings come.  And so, I did.  

Thus, that process, too, was part of what nourished me this week-end.